A Contemporary Analysis of Child Labor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Johanna M. Cook

MSJC Intern

Summer 2005

 

 

 

 

A Contemporary Analysis of Child Labor

Introduction

Five years into the new millennium, we have it in our power to pass on to our children a brighter inheritance than that bequeathed to any previous generation… We can increase respect for human dignity in every land… If we act boldly -- and if we act   together -- we can make people everywhere more secure, more prosperous and better able to enjoy their fundamental human rights (Annan, 2005, p. 3).

 

            In September 2005, governments will be convening at the United Nations for the five year review of the Millennium Declaration.  During this time, government officials will evaluate progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals and discuss the importance of placing people and human rights at the center of development.  As stated by Hilde F. Johnson, Minister of the International Development, Norway, “Children are at the heart of …every Millennium Development Goal” (as cited in UNICEF, 2003, p. 6).  Child labor is interwoven into the issues addressed by the majority of the goals.  While child labor may not be the central crisis facing the world today, it is a major symptom of a larger societal ill: the lack of protection given to children.  Children constitute some of the most vulnerable members of society.  The practice of child labor is contrary to the dignity of human beings and it impedes social development; therefore, it is not an acceptable means of achieving economic development.  Children are often made to bear the brunt of economic and social injustices; thus, it is not practical to isolate child labor from the larger context of poverty, low quality or absence of educational opportunities, gender inequality, cultural views, developing countries lacking sufficient support and rampant diseases like AIDS. 

            This paper will present the most recent global estimates of child labor and the breakdown of the type of labor in which children are often involved, as well as examine the many external factors that propel children to work.  Through this examination, I will give a review of the current efforts to remedy child labor, in addition to proposing some solutions of my own after careful research. Due to the broad nature and complexity of child labor, I have chosen to give attention to the two regions where child labor is most prevalent as cited by the International Labor Organization (ILO), the foremost authority on worldwide child labor issues.  I will then attempt to highlight how the factors that contribute to child labor are at work in these two regions.   It remains important to note that, as with all multifaceted problems, there is no one solution to child labor that will be adequate or even appropriate in all regions in which the predicament exists.  In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) admits that there is no accepted definition or criteria for determining if a major child labor problem exists on the whole (Chao, 2004).  This is why it may be helpful to begin the analysis of this issue by operationally defining child labor and related terminology. 

The Terminology of Child Labor

            Firstly, it is important to note the distinction between child labor and child work.  According to the ILO, child labor is work performed by a child who is under the minimum age specified by national legislation in agreement with accepted national standards for the type of work and is therefore likely to hamper the child’s education and full development” (2002, p.9).  Child work, on the other hand, is classified as children’s participation in economic activity that does not adversely affect their ability to develop healthily and receive a basic education (UNICEF, 2005a).  In fact, light work which is appropriate to a child’s level of maturity, can actually help to socialize the child and enhance his or her well-being by teaching him or her skills and a sense of responsibility.  The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has found that such work “may be important sources of income and labor for poor families, while at the same time leaving some room for human capital development” (2003, p.10).  Many children have age-appropriate jobs that enable them to contribute to the community and the family without being deprived of a childhood of health, peace and dignity.  Americanized examples of light work might include some chores or a paper route. The ILO defines light work as non-hazardous work for less than 14 hours per week and using both the ILO’s and UNICEF’s standards, it is permissible at age twelve (ILO, 2002; UNICEF, 2005a).  Despite these definitions of child labor, child work and light work, one should be aware that UNICEF at times, speaks of child work encompassing both age-appropriate work and the child labor that should be eliminated.   

            A subcategory of child labor is the worst forms of child labor.  These worst forms are internationally defined as slavery, trafficking, debt bondage and other forms of forced labor, forced recruitment of children for use in armed conflict, prostitution and pornography, and illicit activities and hazardous work.  Hazardous work is further defined as “labor that jeopardizes the physical, mental or moral well-being of a child because of the nature of the work or the conditions in which it is carried out.” (2002, p.9) The worst forms of child labor, sans hazardous work, are known as unconditional worst forms of child labor because according to the ILO, they “are so fundamentally at odds with children’s basic human rights that they are absolutely prohibited for persons under… 18” (p.9).  These are the types of child labor that the ILO has slated for immediate elimination above all other forms.  The Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labor No. 182 has been ratified by 153 countries as of March 2005.  It was brought forth in 1999, which makes it the fastest ratified convention in the ILO’s 85 year history (Law, 2005).  However, it must be acknowledged that not all organizations concur with what the ILO deems as a worst form of child labor. There is much controversy around sexual exploitation labeled as a form of labor. 

            Clare Nolan, the NGO representative of Sister of the Good Shepherd at the UN, advocates for women and girls who have been trafficked or otherwise sexually exploited.  Ms. Nolan states that to classify the sexual exploitation of children as labor is demeaning and is in direct contradiction to the UN Declaration of Human Rights.  This is because as her organization sees it, all labor is good to the extent that it produces something for society.  Sexual exploitation does not produce anything good for society and it has ravaging psychological effects on the person, especially the child.  Prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation are pure abuse, which is not equivalent to labor.  Clare Nolan feels that the ILO does a disservice to sexually exploited children by including their plight within child labor because doing so does not fully address the unique harms of sexual exploitation (personal communication, June 22, 2005).  Those that align themselves with the Coalition against Trafficking in Women (CATW) support the view of Clare Nolan as well.  The exchange of money does not define labor.  It is argued that “the money exchanged only deepens the violation to the …girl and her feelings of culpability” (Leidholdt, 2003, ¶ 16).   Furthermore, CATW asserts through Leidholdt’s article that girls trafficked into prostitution are harmed more severely than children being trafficked into exploitive situations of a nonsexual nature because they suffer intimate violations (¶ 39).  It is plain to see that although the ILO is the foremost international authority on labor issues, there is still debate over how some forms of child labor are categorized.  As a result of this debate, for the purposes of this paper, when the worst forms of child labor are mentioned they will include sexual exploitation of children in order to maintain consistency with the ILO and use their statistics, yet I have made the conscious decision not to concentrate attention on sexual exploitation as a form of labor. 

            Moving forward, when the ILO compiles statistics on child labor, it deduces the figure from the number of economically active children.  It must be clear that child labor is not synonymous with economic activity.  Economic activity is the production of goods and services as characterized by the United Nations System of National Accounts.  According to this system, economic activity encompasses the production and processing of all primary products, production for the market of all other goods and services, and the corresponding production for personal consumption of households producing goods and services for the market (Hernandez-Pulido & Caron, 2003).  Economically active children are those children working for at least one hour per week on any activity with or without pay.  This concept does not include work done by children in their own household or school (ILO, 2002).  The fact that economic activity does not include work done within one’s own household is an important fact to remember as domestic child labor will be discussed in an upcoming section.  Presently, we will deal with the child labor that we can measure more concretely relative to child labor within the child’s own home.    

The Scope of the Problem

            According to the most recent global estimates, approximately 352 million children ages 5 through 17 were economically active.  Out of these children, 246 million children are involved in child labor with the majority of these children, approximately 171 million, working in the worst forms of child labor.  Breaking these estimates down further, 8.3 million children are subject to the unconditional worst forms of child labor.  This last figure is a lower bound estimate because countries not offering reliable data are not taken into account in regional or global counting.  Furthermore, no extrapolation was made between countries (ILO, 2002).   These global estimates were tabulated for the year 2000.  Since 2000, individual countries have published their own child labor statistics, which will be explored in the region-specific part of this paper.  Unfortunately, because another report on global child labor statistics has yet to be issued, it is not easy to devise a way to concretely and fairly gauge how the state of child labor has changed since 2000 on a worldwide scale.  The most current documents authored by expert bodies on child labor issues, including the World Bank, ILO, UNICEF and OECD, continue to refer to the estimates for the year 2000.

             Beyond using numbers, it is generally agreed upon that child laborers can be separated into three groups to lend additional comprehension of the range of child labor.  The most common child laborers are children whose labor is controlled by their parents.  This includes work in the child’s own household, work with the family or in a family business, and work for an employer through the parents’ employment relationship.  The second most common group of child laborers is the group of children working directly for someone outside their household while still living in their parents’ household.  The last and least common of the main groupings are those children who have moved or been taken away from their parental household, whose parents are deceased and the children themselves have not been integrated into other households with adult heads or are being exploited through those in their new households (Grimsrud, 2002).  Throughout these groupings similar characteristics of the child laborer emerge.  The ILO established Statistical Information and Monitoring Program on Child Labor (SIMPOC) findings highlight these similarities. 

            SIMPOC shows patterns of child economic activity across seventeen countries; yet, one must be aware that these countries were selected based on data availability, so, their inclusion in SIMPOC does not suggest that they have a major child labor problem (as cited in, OECD, 2003).  Major SIMPOC findings that lend a more detailed understanding of the scope of child labor are as follows.  The number of economically active children increases with each age group.  This is most likely because older children are able to produce more.  Plus, children in rural areas are much more likely to be economically active in comparison to their rural counterparts.  The number of hours worked per day varies widely between countries; still, six of the sixteen countries for which this data is available report that more than a third of children work past seven hours per day.  This amounts to as many children working full-time without time to attend to educational or other social and developmental needs.  What is almost worse is that a preponderance of working children are not compensated for their work.  This trend wanes as children age, most likely because older children are both more assertive and productive, leaving the younger children to replace them as mainly unpaid family workers (as cited in, OECD, 2003).  It is beneficial to realize that the extent of child labor cannot be fully appreciated from a numbers standpoint.  The groupings of child laborers and how their labor is controlled as well as SIMPOC findings begin to present a picture of how child labor is distributed. 

Measurement Challenges

            In order to design effective policies to eradicate child labor, it is necessary to understand how the data on the scope of the problem was collected and the shortcomings of the methods used. It is imperative that one realizes that the numbers given are the best estimates based on the best information available at the time.  According to the ILO, though the methods of measurement have become more reliable in recent years, there is still much room for improvement (2002).  Giving attention to these measurement difficulties aids one in seeing the complexity of child labor in general and where there is room for improvement, as well as seeing where policy can be directed. 

             Perhaps one of the biggest challenges is counting and researching children who work in clandestine operations in the informal economy, in private homes and family ventures.  These children are difficult to track down in the first place and if they are found, there is often no record of their work (ILO, 2002).  This means that the estimates given could be lower than the reality of the situation because it is difficult to count children working in secret or outside of the formal economy. 

            To get a clearer picture of what the estimates represent, it is helpful to know what they are based upon.  The estimate of the number of economically active children is founded mainly on surveys given to children ages five to seventeen throughout the world.  This method, though fairly direct, lends itself to errors.  Underestimating the number of economically active children is quite probable due to the often transient nature of children’s involvement in the labor market (Ritualo, Castro & Gormly, 2003).  Children alternate between being enrolled in school and going to work.  This depends on the income of the family, the season and where income prospects are thought to be present (ILO, 2002).  Estimates of economically active children represent the ethnographic present.   They are like snapshots of the situation at the very time the questions were being asked.  They do not adequately capture the children who are most at-risk of becoming child laborers.  The number of economically active children could also be skewed because of the nature of the questions posed to young children who may not have a developed since of time. This means they may not be able to accurately pinpoint when and for how long they worked.  Also, because the number of economically active children does not include children who perform chores within in their own household, orphaned children performing domestic service for their extended relatives may not be counted. The orphaned children are considered part of their relatives’ household although they may be engaged in heavy labor.  This is not an uncommon occurrence in parts of the world such as Africa, where much of the continent’s child population has been left orphaned due to the AIDS pandemic.  This particular factor will be touched on in an upcoming section of this paper.  Also, because domestic labor is not well accounted for, the labor of girls is undercounted.  When other studies have given attention to household work, they found that girls undertake a disproportionate amount of domestic chores (Basu & Tzannatos, 2003). 

            Additionally, child labor statistics, which are begotten from figures of child economic activity, have margins of error as well.  This is because the ILO by in large gives individual governments the responsibility of determining which types of work can be considered light work and which types can be considered hazardous (USDOL ILAB, 2005).   In general, for most types of work, children above the age of fifteen are allowed to be employed, however; work deemed hazardous has minimum employment age of eighteen.  If governments have the ability to decide which types of work they classify as hazardous, then the same job that is considered child labor in one country may not be considered child labor in another country by virtue of how the government defines hazardous work. Also, governments cooperate in supplying information to the ILO and UNICEF on a voluntary basis.  Though governments are highly encouraged to give information on the current state of child labor with the incentive of bolstering their image as a concerned member of the global community, they cannot be forced to divulge information (ILO, 2002).  It is difficult to see the full picture of child labor when governments are not consistently and fully cooperative. 

            As one can see, despite good efforts on the part of international organizational bodies, measurement challenges spring from many sources.  Children in the informal economy are not easily accounted for because they work in secret and/or their labor is not officially recorded.  Children move in and out of work for various reasons including the season and family need.  Children also move between different jobs based upon the prospect of greater income.  Sometimes the extent of domestic child labor is overlooked because heavy domestic chores completed in the child’s own household are not included in the definition of economic activity.  On the governmental level, countries are left mostly on their own to determine what types of jobs should be classified as hazardous work and light work.  Furthermore, governments can freely decide whether they want to reveal their figures and policies on child labor within their own countries.  Being aware of these challenges help to put the most recent estimates into perspective while also laying out areas in which can be improved upon for the next global estimation.

            In any respect, it is evident from these estimates that child labor exists on a wide scale, yet sheer numbers cannot sufficiently expose greater issue.  After all, it is the human injustice that is at the heart of this matter.  As the ILO advocates, it is crucial that organizations who want to end the plight of child laborers, learn where these children are, the sectors, both formal and informal, in which they are involved, and how their labor is affecting them (2002).  Hence, we must begin to view child labor within the context of other relationships that propel children into premature and/or perilous work.

Why Child Labor Exists

            There have been many well-supported theories as to why child labor remains so prevalent in current times.  It is helpful to look at the presence of child labor from the perspective of the family and the employer, otherwise known as the supply side and demand side.  Each perspective presents different reasons for utilizing children in the labor force.  Firstly, the societal factors acting on the family and the child will be explored.  These factors include poverty, lack of educational opportunities, gender biases, cultural allowances and disease.  Next, the factors that determine the demand for child labor will be investigated.  These factors include the mistaken idea that children are better suited for some work, as well as the fact that they are cheap forms of labor given the reality that those who are prone to hire children have low production capabilities and limited capital.

            Poverty is repeatedly cited as a main cause of child labor (ILO, 2003a; Basu & Tzannatos, 2003; ILO, 2002; Amanda Teckman, personal communication, June 2, 2005).  Parents are sending their children to work and children are seeking work as a method of survival.  No opportunity for income can be forgone and families are forced to calculate a grave cost/benefit analysis.  According to Basu and Tzannatos, it has been largely confirmed that parents do not enjoy making their children work, but rather it is a forced choice and had they any other viable options their children would not be employed (2003).  The earning power of the adults in a household is a significant determinant of a family’s welfare.  Adults, as the ILO proclaims, are in need of decent work, which is work that allows adults to provide for themselves and their family in freedom, dignity and security (Somavia, 2005a).  Adults enlist the help of children to earn income for the family because grown-ups themselves lack opportunities for decent work.  Parents send their children to work, so they can immediately increase income rather than investing in their children’s social and academic development which will make their children more productive and increase income to higher degree in the future (OECD, 2003).  These families lack the ability to borrow funds in the meantime in order to improve upon human capital which would result in bigger payoffs in the future. 

            Poverty, however, does not purely refer to a lack of monetary income and expenditure.  Poor children express low self-worth and report experiences of being considered inferior by more affluent households (ILO, 2002).  In a broader sense, poverty encompasses the factors of living standards and quality of life as well as income.  When poverty is viewed holistically, there is a stronger positive correlation between poverty and child labor (OECD, 2003).  Through examining different findings, there seems to be evidence that total income and child labor are weak correlates in certain regions.  Pierre Couralet’s studies in Latin America show that total income alone barely has an effect on child labor (as cited in OECD, 2003).  Some may take this as evidence that a lack of family funds is not always related to child labor, yet Basu and Tzannatos (2003) argue that “the income that a household targets as the minimum acceptable may not coincide with the nation’s or region’s official poverty line” (p. 159).  Thus, a family may have serious financial struggles that are not reported in studies that use a country’s unrealistically low poverty line as measure.  Basu and Tzannatos offer an additional reason as to why some studies have found that child labor does not follow greater income poverty.  Households that own more land usually employ their children to a greater extent, which may be perplexing since greater land ownership is typically equated with greater income.  To explain what is known as the wealth paradox, Bhalotra and Heady have found that holding more land leads to the ability to use the household’s labor in a more productive fashion.  This includes putting the children of the household to work (as cited in Bau & Tzannatos, 2003).  That said, despite their generally larger incomes, households that own more land are more inclined to utilize child labor than households that own less land because owning more land increases the rewards of child labor.   These are two explanations of how being less impoverished does not automatically negate child labor.

            Poverty also seriously strains relationships within families and weakens communities.  When these crucial bonds are considerably weakened, the capacity of the person to break out of the cycle of deprivation is also lessened (ILO, 2003a).  People rely on the support of family and community to both contribute to society and receive from society.  In this regard, poverty isolates people by creating a sense of shame because of the person’s inability to give back to society.  This shame and isolation only perpetuates the cycle of poverty which leaves the children of poor families at a higher risk of being pulled into child labor.  

            Still, not everyone agrees that a holistic notion of poverty furthers child labor, more than the basic explanation of poverty, i.e. the need for money.  For example, Barbara Briggs, senior associate of the National Labor Committee (NLC) asserts that low self-esteem and class issues do not definitively keep people in poverty.  Rather, it is the lack of viable options for families to overcome their situation when they are focused on making the most of all of their assets, including children, to endure (personal communication, July 7, 2005).  Briggs takes the view that families send their children to work out of economic necessity related to income.  Workers’ lack of funds despite working themselves to the point of exhaustion is what keeps families in poverty.

            No matter how poverty is defined, it does affect the push to send children to work.  It is a cycle that is transmitted to the next generation (UNICEF, 2004; Basu & Tzannatos, 2003; ILO, 2003a; ILO 2003b).  Parents are not given the option of helping to develop their children’s potential.  There is no time to invest in human capital development for the future when subsistence in the moment is the priority. Though experts disagree on which factor within poverty has the strongest affect, it is most likely a combination of income, living standards, quality of life, community and family support and alternatives to child labor.  It is possible that the strength of the link between poverty and child labor on a worldwide basis could be more established with a universally accepted definition of poverty that integrates insufficient income and unmet basic needs.  Decreasing both kinds of poverty, with a special focus on impoverished children, would serve to reduce child labor (UNICEF, 2001). 

            The cyclical nature of poverty is related to education, another major factor that decides whether a child will be engaged in labor.  The availability of good education is a way of out poverty.  If children do not have access to quality education they cannot acquire the knowledge and skills that they will need to become productive members of society.  This is basic logical reasoning, but the reality that accompanies these statements starkly contradicts the notion that the world understands them.  Not only, are actual school facilities scarce in many parts of the world, but the quality of education is often poor and/or it is not good enough for the families to consider schooling their children more beneficial than putting them to work (ILO, 2003a).  The ILO Convention no. 138 pairs the minimum age allowable to work with a country’s set age of completion of mandatory schooling.  It was set up this way to allow for children’s maximum human capital to develop so that they are then able to fully contribute to the economic and social development of society to the best of their ability.  However, even where primary educational facilities are set up, student/teacher ratios and the level of training teachers receive are not conducive to learning.  In some countries within Sub-Saharan Africa there are more than seventy students per one teacher.  In South and West Asia average student/teacher ratios are greater than 40.  Also, differences within one country can be quite vast and these differences are not always made known because they are not reflected in national and regional averages.   Plus, in developing countries approximately half of teachers lack formal training and only slightly above one third of teachers are trained in some countries within the Asia-Pacific region.  In fact, many developing countries are inclined to employ an increasingly higher percentage of teachers with no formal training due to the financial restrictions of these countries (UNESCO, 2003).  In light of these statistics, it is easy to see how families choose child labor when faced with the decision of sending children off to receive a poor quality of education or sending children to work to benefit the short-term needs of the family and acquire life skills. 

            On the whole, the ILO reports that many countries have improved access to primary education; however, those who were already better off have benefited from this much more so than the poor (2003a).  It has been found that “children from families living on poverty incomes often start work at the age when their better-off counterparts are beginning to read” (ILO, 2003a, p.22).  One probable explanation is that although tuition might be free, school fees for supplies such as pens and paper and the need for appropriate clothing rule out schooling for the poor even if quality education is available nearby.  Any additional fee amounts to a large investment for families struggling to keep all their members fed.  This kind of statement underscores the importance of examining the perspective of the family in order to design and implement appropriate and effective educational programs that deter child labor.

            One should be aware that there are also children who combine work and school, though not often successfully.  School performance goes down due to fatigue and absenteeism across the age groups, except in cases of children engaged in light work (ILO, 2002).  In any case, work and school are not mutually exclusive. The ILO’s newest global estimates show that of the 12% of 5 to 9 year-olds working, 7% combine work and school.  Out of 23% of 10 to 14 year-olds working, 10% attend school simultaneously and for the 42.5% of 15 to 17 year-olds, 11% attend school as well (2002).  Those persons in a position to make educational and labor policy should take these estimates into account.  Referring back to the ILO’s Minimum Age Convention, the age at which compulsory school ends should be the minimum age allowable for work, yet for 60 countries out of 91 where data was available these ages did not coincide.  For some countries, there was as much as a three year gap (ILO, 2002).  This may send mixed messages to families as to the acceptableness of sending children to work before their compulsory education is completed.  Not to mention, living in a community where sending children to work over school or to work and school is common may desensitize families to the child’s loss of future potential or healthy psychosocial and physical development. 

            Culture and gender also play a role in the use of child labor from a family perspective.  Girls do not receive the same opportunities to attend primary school as boys do and so girls are more vulnerable to work prematurely.  Approximately 60% of children in the entire world who do not go to primary school are female (UNESCO, 2003).  Some explanation for this include that certain cultures forbid co-educational classes, far distances between home and school make travel unsafe for girls, pregnant girls are sometimes excluded from school, girls are being valued for their domestic work, and that girls’ labor is sometimes used to facilitate their younger brothers in attending school (Basu & Tzannatos, 2003; UNESCO, 2003; ILO, 2002, OECD, 2003).  Cultural gender biases make it easier to put girls to work.  Still, in general, without respect to gender, child labor is accepted by families and the common public as a fact of life.  Omar Adnan, an Iraqi father of three comments, "I believe that we marry and have children to alleviate our lives from work.  My father made me work at the age of nine and I sent my children to work when they were 10. There is nothing wrong with that, especially for families who do not have good financial support like mine" (IRIN, 2005).  Statements like this represent the need for concerned parties to generate greater awareness of the dangers of child labor in order to create systemic change, commencing with the attitudes of adult household heads. 

            The effects of diseases, such as the AIDS virus makes an impact on child labor worth mentioning, especially on the continent of Africa where it is most prevalent.  One main outcome of AIDS as related to child labor is the death of parents.  Africa accounts for the largest fraction of orphaned children in the world (USAID, as cited in OECD, 2003).  Since the virus mainly kills young, economically active adults it has strained government resources in already impoverished countries beyond the breaking point (Mturi & Nzimande, 2003).   In Sub-Saharan Africa, communities provide support for orphaned children, but with dramatic death tolls, it has become increasingly difficult for community members and extended families to take in all the children that have been left parentless.  Child-headed households have sprung up as a direct result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic (Rau, 2002).  Though child-headed households make up a small percentage of households in which orphans reside, they contribute to the preponderance of child labor in Sub-Saharan Africa.  For instance all of the child-headed households surveyed in Zambia were classified as extremely poor (UNICEF, as cited in Rau, 2002).  These children are compelled to find work in order to provide for the rest of the children in the household.  Additionally, orphaned children who are taken in by community members or extended families are at a risk for becoming child laborers as well.  They may be used as a domestic servant in their new household and they run the risk of being required to work, so that the other non-orphan children within the household can attend school (Rau, 2002).  Not much data is available on these circumstances because child domestic labor goes largely unaccounted for when the work is done in what is considered to be the child’s own household.

            Furthermore, the AIDS pandemic is lowering the quality of education in Sub-Saharan Africa.  There has been a drastic loss of teachers to HIV/AIDS.  According to Rau, in 1998 the deaths of teachers in Zambia was equivalent to two-thirds of the graduates from teacher training colleges and as of 2001, the ratio is increasing (2002).  Of course, these deaths and even the sicknesses that go along with HIV lead to more teacher absences which are responsible for a deficiency in the quality of education and disruptions in learning.  These hard truths make parents more reluctant to send children to school over work because it is not seen as a good investment of their children’s time. 

            Now we turn to an explanation of the demand for child labor which centers on the employer’s perspective.  It is overwhelmingly untrue that children are better equipped than adults for certain types of labor; in fact adults are more productive (OECD, 2003).  Parsimoniously stated, the benefit to employers is that they are able to cut costs by hiring children over adults.   This is one reason child labor may be attractive to employers; children are a source of cheap labor. This in turn, affects the amount of decent work available to adults, which increases the amount of child laborers earning income for their households.  Employers that are apt to hire children may not understand the long-term benefits of hiring adults or they may not have the capital to increase their production.  The tasks that children perform in developing countries are mechanized in industrialized countries (OECD, 2003).  At the same time they are unwilling to pay an adult workforce more because it takes away from their immediate profits.  Plus, physically grueling jobs such as factory jobs and farm work lead to early burnout, which increases the demand for a younger workforce.  In the apparel industry, women are often fired in their late twenties and so their young children must make up for the loss of income (Amanda Teckman, personal communication, June 2, 2005).    Employers also like children because they are more docile than adult workers.   Entrepreneurs, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, have a penchant for hiring young workers, particularly females, because they are socialized to be obedient and they are far less likely to assert themselves than adult male employees (personal communication, July 7, 2005).  Mainly there is a demand for child labor because children are seen as an available resource, rather than as human beings developing toward autonomy.  Children are cheap, compliant and easily expendable in the unskilled labor force.  Children are not seen as full-fledged human beings nor are they seen as exempt from the hardships of adult life.  This viewpoint spurs on child labor and results in harming the community as well. 

            Plainly stated, utilizing child labor affects the economic and social health of the community by keeping people trapped in poverty.  Children are not given the chance to expand their knowledge and skills so that they can apply it in the future for the good of the community.  Instead, their energies are entirely focused on the immediate needs, such as monetarily supporting the family.  As exemplified by Omar Adnan, the Iraqi father who spoke of sending his children to work, former child laborers may go on to have children who become child laborers.  Parents who receive an education are more likely to value education and more likely to send their children to school (OECD, 2003).  This, of course, allows children to acquire skills which leads to a more educated and self-sustaining community.  Also, since adults have been shown to have higher productivity than children (OECD, 2003), hiring children because they are cheaper does not advance the production of small community businesses.  Thus, business growth is stunted and the ability to increase revenue is severely limited. 

Where Children are Employed

            The capacity in which child labor is being employed varies greatly.  Although, the media has centered attention on the work conditions within the apparel industry in the last decade, the vast majority of child labor is found to take place outside the corporate factory walls.  Currently, the majority of child labor takes place in agriculture which includes fishing, hunting and forestry.  By the latest ILO estimates, 70% of economically active children are employed in this sector.  Agriculture is followed by manufacturing where less than 9% of children are economically active; wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels also with less than 9% of economically active children; 6.5% are in community, social and personal services; 4% are in transport, storage and communication; and 3% of economically active children engaged in construction, mining and quarrying (ILO, 2002).  It is helpful to keep in mind that while the percentage of children engaged in agricultural employment looks to overshadow children’s involvement in other industries, the number of children that correspond with the smaller looking percentages is still far too high.  Even so, approaching the problem from a productive standpoint necessitates going after the types of work in which children are most at risk.  This year the ILO chose to spotlight the estimated 1 million children working in salt mines and quarries on June 12^th, 2005, the designated World Day Against Child Labor.  Salt mining is hazardous, physically punishing, potentially fatal work that leaves children with spine deformities and puts them at-risk of loosing limbs among other hazards.  Admittedly, the ILO’s decision to give attention to this population of child laborers is commendable and it corresponds to their commitment to eliminate the worst forms of child labor.  Even so, when taking both numbers of children and hazards involved there are other areas which seem to demand more immediate attention.

            Agriculture and domestic labor are two areas where children are most vulnerable.  The majority of governments already have long-standing prescriptive legislation on child labor (Betcherman, Fares, Luinstra & Prouty, 2004).  Despite the reality that many of these countries lack the resources to adequately implement their legislation, the fact that laws exist helps to at least create an awareness of the problem.  However, child labor within agriculture and domestic service does not even receive the public awareness afforded to labor in other sectors.  This is perhaps because agricultural and domestic child laborers are more easily concealed by the very nature of their work.  In fact, the ILO cannot even give a good estimate on the percentage of domestic child laborers since they are not considered economically active and, therefore, what could be counted as child domestic labor is included in the estimate of community, social and personal services. The ILO says child domestic labor includes work done by children both below the legal minimum age and above it, but under 18.  This work is undertaken in slavery-like, hazardous, or other exploitative conditions.  Domestic child laborers are exempt from all outside scrutiny because once they enter their employer’s household they are completely subject to his or her will and can literally be kept hidden not only from ILO surveys, but from family, friends and neighbors as well (ILO, 2004).  Still yet, according to an ILO report “much of the available literature shows child domestic labor is one of the most common and traditional forms of child labor” (2004, p.6).  Not to mention, within agriculture many rural children are subcontracted, so bigger businesses may not even be aware that they are indirectly utilizing child labor.  The ILO Bureau for Workers’ Activities says that “data from countries with reasonably good labor statistics or special studies on children suggest… that a far higher percentage of rural rather than urban children work, that they start earlier (at 5, 6 or 7 years) and that they may work more days and hours” (2002).  The breadth of this problem begins to emerge from this finding as it is likely that most rural children are performing agricultural work.  I have chosen to focus on these two areas of domestic labor and agriculture because they are prevalent in regions where the most children are actively involved in child labor. 

            Sub-Saharan Africa is teeming with child laborers. Unlike other regions such as Asia and Latin America which have seen a decline in the incidence of child labor, sub-Saharan Africa has remained steadfast in its child labor problem.  It has the largest proportion of child laborers in that 29% of all children under the age of 15 are economically active (ILO, 2002).  The OECD speculates that this is due to negative economic growth, conflicts between countries within the region, inadequate governance and the AIDS pandemic.  What is worse is that this trend may continue due to the escalating numbers of people living in poverty, declining living standards, the inability of education systems to reach out to children and scarce economic growth levels (2003).  Most working children in this region are laboring on household-run farms or other agricultural ventures.  Often, children work part-time allowing them to attend school if schooling is available (ILO, 2002).  Although the extent to which these children’s work affects their ability to learn at school is unclear and at the same time, as of 1999, this area of Africa was home to 36% of the 120 million children of primary school age that are not in school (UNICEF, 2000). Today, funding for educational programs remains severely stretched because of countries’ immense debt repayments, but governments with the support of both in-country and international NGOs are working to improve the quality of the educational system.  This has been done thus far by NGOs taking the training of educators into their own hands and hiring more teachers to decrease the student/teacher ratio (OECD, 2003; Rau, 2002).  Domestic labor is often more incompatible with school attendance and it is believed to be widespread in Africa due to the practice of community foster care where orphaned children are taken in by other households, as mentioned previously.  Not all orphaned children become domestic servants, but it is more probable that they are put to work for their foster family because of the immense population and the impoverished state of households in the region.  Sub-Saharan Africa is unique in that it also has a large number of inactive children who do not work or attend school relative to other parts of the world with high child labor rates (OECD, 2003).  This may be a result of a child population which outnumbers adults.  In any case, this finding shows that in this area it is not always a choice between work and school.  Within sub-Saharan Africa countries which have existing labor laws, such as Zambia, fail to address child labor on commercial farms or in the informal sector which includes household farms and domestic child labor (Rau, 2002).  Excluding the biggest sectors where children are most vulnerable in sub-Saharan Africa from labor legislation implicitly condones child labor.  This is an overriding problem.  There is no good governance because the region’s economic structure is in shambles.  There is a lack of funding to provide social support to communities plagued by HIV/AIDS, conflict, and poverty.  These are major constraints that impact child labor in sub-Saharan Africa and they require serious consideration when decision- makers go about designing policy in an effort to mitigate the plight of children.

            Moving on, the Asia-Pacific region has the largest absolute number, approximately 127 million, of working children under the age of 15 (ILO, 2002).  Within this region India is still purported to have the greatest child labor problem.  The estimates as to the number of child laborers, however, vary from 10 million to as much as 100 million depending upon who or what NGO or GO conducted the study, though they all claim to use terms as they are defined by the ILO (Lieten, 2004).   The latest estimates available from UNICEF cover the years 1999 through 2003 and state that 14% of the total population of India’s 5 to 14 year-olds was engaged in child labor (2004).  Percentage-wise this is on the low-end compared to other countries in the region that provided data, but considering India’s large population puts the magnitude of this percentage into perspective.  India mainly employs children in home-based agricultural or domestic employment, yet once again the numbers for domestic workers are not plainly laid out.  According to one report giving statistics on India, “20% of all children under 14 working outside the family are in domestic service” (ILO, 2004, p. 15).  Many children moved into domestic or agricultural work after labor laws in manufacturing became more stringent in the late 1990s.  In comparison to sub-Saharan Africa, cultural reasons account for child labor more in India.  Indian culture prizes work as a way of socializing its children.  Most economically active children work during the day and attend school at night.  Groups of children themselves oppose governmental bans on child labor because they interfere with the economic freedom of children attending morning work and evening school (Flower, 2004).  However, the situation in India is not quite copasetic.  Children do not have time for leisure that is essential to development if they are splitting their time between work and school at an early age (ILO, 2002).  More collaboration between bodies that wish to estimate the current extent of child labor in India is needed in order to narrow the range of present statistics.  Also, recognizing cultural acceptance of child labor as a factor in India can help to shape policy at the local level. 

            After discussing child labor as related to developing countries one may be tempted to erroneously infer that child labor is only a problem in poor economies when it is true that the United States continues to have its share of child labor problems within agriculture.  As explained by Reid Maki, director of the Children in the Fields Campaign, children working in agriculture in the U.S. are not afforded the same protections as those children working in other industries.  Minimum work ages for agricultural work tend to be lower.  This has to do with what Maki refers to as the “legacy of the agrigarian myth.”  U.S. farms are thought of as wholesome family operations that instill a good work ethic in children and teach them American values.  The reality is that farms are consistently ranked by the USDOL as the most dangerous workplaces because while there is a lack of farm worker data, injuries are still tallied and farm work accounts for the most injuries.  Most of the children doing farm work in the U.S. are legal immigrants and most will enter the school system, but the work is very disruptive.  Their lifestyle often brings about chronic absenteeism, weariness and change of schools.  Child labor within agriculture is fluid because companies and growers are not intentionally hiring children, but rather allowing them to work because of how the payment system is organized.  Children are not on the payroll; instead the pay system is set up so that it is easy for multiple children to be working under one parent’s social security number and then the adult is then paid based on the piece rates for what was harvested.  There are very few investigators to look into this problem, yet currently organizations, such as the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs are pushing for legislation that will give more protection to children within agriculture and increase the number of investigators (personal communication, July 20, 2005).  Child labor, therefore, is not limited to economically struggling countries.  The ways in which the laws govern agricultural work and the manner in which workers are paid enable children to engage in hazardous work even in the United States.

            Switching gears from some of the most prevalent and hazardous forms of child labor we will delve into the state of child labor within the apparel manufacturing industry.  As the MSJC centers a proportion of its efforts on sweatshop labor issues, it is important to look at child labor in relation to sweatshops.  Thanks to strides made by activists groups and consumers alike, child labor is practically an outdated practice in the apparel industry.  According to Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the NLC, “after the Kathie Lee episode [in which she was confronted with the fact that her clothing line was being produced by children] child labor was virtually stopped around the world in the export sectors… [it is] very rare to see children in the apparel factories exporting to the U.S.” (Lopate, 2005).  Kernaghan, also known as the man who made Kathie Lee cry, was instrumental in shedding light on companies, namely Wal-Mart with their clothing bearing the Kathie Lee label, who used child labor in their production.  Since this news was circulated in the light of day, it pushed companies to ascertain that their products were being made in an ethical manner, at least where child labor was concerned.  Now while the ILO (2004) defines child as a person under the age of 18 in its reports, it is important to continue to stress that the minimum age for employment varies depending upon the type of work as stated in the ILO’s Convention No. 138, Minimum Age Convention (as cited in Hernandez-Pulido & Caron, 2003).  In the apparel industry, fifteen is the minimum age allowable for work except in countries whose economic and educational supports are underdeveloped, in which case the minimum age can be lowered to fourteen.  As long as the work is not hazardous, it is not child labor for anyone above the minimum age, but under the age of eighteen.  Kernaghan acknowledges that, for the most part, companies respect the minimum age restrictions and it is this respect which mainly accounts for the scarcity of child labor within the apparel industry (Lopate, 2005).   At first glance, this is seemingly positive information; however, it is necessary to examine the effects of efforts to scale back child labor in this industry. 

            For instance, Wal-Mart put into practice a zero tolerance policy for child labor which exacerbated the problems of other workers.  Wal-Mart would immediately and indelibly cease to do business with a factory if there was a sole underage worker violation. This practice did not take into account how easy it is for a child on the cusp of the legal minimum age to forge documents and it did not give the factory a chance to learn from its mistakes and improve.  The former policy actually could be seen as contributing to the problem because it decreased the work for an already impoverished people.  Now Wal-Mart has modified this policy in response to suggestions from NGOs who saw the previous practice as detrimental to hundreds of other workers.  If there are two or less underage workers found to be employed at a factory in which Wal-Mart does business, Wal-Mart works with the factory to remedy the situation and then re-audits the factory after thirty days have passed.  If the underage workers are no longer laboring in the factory and they have been appropriately compensated and returned to their home, the factory can continue to manufacture for Wal-Mart.  On the other hand, if after this time children are still employed or there are any age violations found in the future at the same factory, Wal-Mart will permanently pull its business out of the factory (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 2005).  This new policy makes Wal-Mart’s contempt for child labor apparent, yet at the same time, the policy takes measures to rectify the problem of underage workers without affecting the livelihood of other workers.  Otherwise, these workers might be forced to increase the income-earners in their individual households, which could then lead to an increase in child labor in the informal economy and in subcontracting arrangements, which are often unable to be monitored. 

            Positively speaking, subcontracting is becoming less frequent in the last decade due increasingly larger factories coming onto the scene.  Subcontracting shops have fewer orders to fill because larger factories can handle the demand on their own.  This has lead to a decrease in the number of child laborers throughout the industry (USDOL as cited in ApparelSearch, 2005). Subcontractors are more likely to hire children than large factories because subcontractors are less likely to be caught.  Companies contract with the main factory and have little to no dealings with subcontractors.

            Moreover, some factory managers will not hire children ages 15 through 17 even though they meet minimum age requirements.  The refusal to hire this age group is particularly prevalent in Honduras.  Factory managers are wary of children who may forge proof-of-age documents.  Many fear backlash in the form of adverse publicity from the United States and other importing countries if an underage worker who has supplied fraudulent documentation is caught working (USDOL as cited in ApparelSearch, 2005).   Also, though they are legally allowed to work, those aged fifteen through seventeen are subject to different rules that regulate the number of hours they are allowed to work.  Some plant managers neither want to take the risk of overlooking these regulations nor want to be inconvenienced to enforce them.  In fact, overworking fifteen to seventeen year olds employees is one way in which child labor still exists, though minimally, in the apparel industry.  Most US companies state the maximum number of hours young employees are allowed to work as compared with those eighteen and older (USDOL as cited in ApparelSearch, 2005).  Governments also make legal provisions for allowable work hours though these laws are rarely enforced by the governments.  If 15 to 17 year-old workers exceed the maximum amount of time, their work becomes child labor because it is hazardous in that it is detrimental to their health.  Additionally, plant managers are concerned about anti-child labor legislation which would ban the export of their goods to large markets such as the United States.  The National Labor Committee is proposing legislation of this sort to ban the import of all products made with sweatshop labor in late September of this year (Amanda Teckman, personal communication, June 2, 2005).  These are all viable reasons that some managers do not want the hassle of hiring workers under the age of eighteen whether or not they meet the minimum age requirement because managers fear negative publicity from Western consumers in the event that age documents are falsified or rules that govern work hours for young employees are violated. 

            Still, child labor violations creep up in the apparel industry from time to time, but they are on a much smaller scale than the violations a decade ago.  Most recently in December 2004, the National Labor Committee exposed deplorable conditions at the Kingmaker Footwear factory in China.  Kingmaker primarily manufactures for the shoe company Timberland.  The cited child labor violations pertained to several 14 and 15 year-olds who with the other workers, mostly young women, were being forced to work overtime, verbally and physically abused and denied their rightful wages and benefits (NLC, 2004). Timberland proceeded to issue a statement regarding working conditions at the factory in April of 2005.  Timberland said that they could not speak for factory management, but that they are in the midst of preparing for more formal communication, morale and worker election initiatives (China Labor Watch, 2005).  While the situation at Kingmaker is still unacceptable, it is nonetheless a far cry from the hundreds of children doing piecework in Bangladesh factories, for instance, during the early 1990s. 

            We can glean insight from examining the recent history of dramatic change in the apparel industry.  While each sector of child labor is unique and as a result demands innovative and specialized approaches for its eradication, there is much inspiration and hope in seeing what consumers and social justice advocates armed with information can do.   At the same time, these changes did not happen overnight and there were unintended negative effects that needed to be remedied as a result.  These unintended effects stress the need for safety nets for ex-child workers.  These are lessons that can be applied to the other areas of child labor, such as agricultural and domestic labor. 

Eliminating Child Labor vs. Improving Work Conditions

            At this point, child labor has been defined, the reasons for its use have been analyzed from both the supply and demand sides, the effects of its use on the community and children themselves have been intertwined throughout the various sections, and the areas in which it is most prevalent and children are most vulnerable have been examined along with the severely diminished appearance of child labor within the apparel industry.  Now a decision must be made as to how to make the best use of the information in order to help child laborers.  There is some debate over whether to focus on eradicating child labor or improving upon the working conditions of children.  Among those who favor the outright elimination of child labor include the ILO, UNICEF, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the NLC. While there is some overlap as to how they feel that this should be done, there are also some differences in where these bodies place emphasis and some questions as to how well their proposals will actually work.             

            The  ICFTU says that “eliminating child labor is a matter of political will…[and] usually any income from children makes only a marginal impact on overall household income” (2005, ¶5).  The children’s monetary contribution to the household is not enough to justify slowly phasing out child labor.  The ICFTU favors education as a means to eradicate child labor.  It says that it is imperative that all children are in school in order to make progress in social and economic development.  A political decision that is backed with the funding to build and staff schools must be made to make the elimination of child labor a priority (2005).  This would allow for social development which would eventually lead to economic development because an educated society can accomplish more.  However, social development cannot be seen as a means to economic development, but rather a worthy humanistic goal in and of itself that betters the quality of life for peoples.  Also, economic growth is in no way an automatic fix for child labor.  This is merely one piece of the puzzle.  Otherwise, developed countries would not be a part of the child labor problem, but we know that they are as discussed earlier with the example of the U.S. and child labor within agriculture. 

            Karin Landgren, UNICEF Chief of Child Protection, believes that political will is part of what will lead to the annihilation of child labor.  In a June 11, 2004 interview, she emphasized the need for strong government commitments to eliminating child labor, but adds that families, communities and children themselves must also have a hand in the eradication of child labor (as cited in UNICEF, 2005a).  This means the resolve to cease child labor must be an integrated between all parties.  Governments can make a commitment to enforcing laws to protect children and providing basic education to children while educating communities about the harms of child labor, but they must work with the communities to make sure solutions are sustainable.  Children must make full use of their resilient nature and the knowledge and experiences they have to make those in positions of power aware of their plight.  Still, relying on the youth to protect themselves seems paradoxical and it is still adults and those in power that must encourage them to speak out.

            The NLC puts stock into this approach of letting the workers tell their stories as well.  As an organization, the NLC has gained much of their support by organizing tours of primarily young women who have endured hazardous and demeaning work conditions and bringing them to speak to large groups of American students and consumers.  According to Briggs, this manner of reaching out to the public has more of an effect on changing labor conditions than government legislation.  As in the apparel industry, the NLC argues that child labor can be most effectively phased out with a social movement rather than trying to pass legislation that may or may not be able to enforced especially with the many differences between countries (Barbara Briggs, personal communication, July 20, 2005).        

            Those who favor improving working conditions may feel that this option is more practical in a short time frame than the systemic change needed in order to eradicate child labor.   Also, even though the funds that a child contributes to the household may be marginal as previously cited by ICFTU, this speaks volumes about the poverty of the families when even the smallest amount of additional income is coveted.  Eliminating child labor before adequate educational programs and ways for families to compensate for their lost income are established will threaten the survival of families.  India, for example, has a number of child unions that go unrecognized by the ICFTU, but nonetheless exist to improve the lives of working children and their families.  The National Movement of Working Children is an Indian federation of working children’s organizations that had nine members as of the end of 2003. Bhima Sangha is one such organization that bills itself as working on behalf of child laborers in Bangalore, India.  It gives working children a forum in which to discuss their lives and problems while encouraging independent thought and providing night schools, so children can obtain a basic education.  Bhima Sangha demands that decision-makers confer with working children before policy is made that concerns their lives (Flower, 2004).  Often, child unions feel that bans on child labor interfere with the economic freedom of children who wish to attend work and school (F. Merlin Flower, personal communication, May 31, 2005).  Also, it must be noted that improving work conditions can result in eliminating child labor and it can be done through these child unions, provided the children are at or above the minimum allowable age for the type of work in which they are engaged.  Eliminating the conditions that make the work hazardous no longer classifies the work as child labor as long as the children meet the minimum age requirements.  In this situation, it is acceptable to focus on improving working conditions, but beyond this situation merely improving conditions implicitly condones child labor and it does not break the cycle of poverty.   All in all, it is far better to remove children from the workforce and provide them with quality education and provide better work opportunities and conditions for adults.

Probable Solutions

            Ridding the world of child labor necessitates a combined approach that is gender sensitive and family oriented.  The goal is to find solutions that enable families and children to be able to choose education over age inappropriate work.  The United Nations calls for change to take place at the local level.  The first seven Millennium Development Goals are directed towards developing countries. While it has already been noted that developing countries are not the only ones that engage child labor, working children are most prevalent in these regions.  Change, if it is to be sustained, must start with communities.  The prevailing message at the June 20, 2005 Community Commons Press Conference was that indigenous peoples need to play a larger role in their own development.  Communities need to be at the core of policy making because they know what will and will not work for them.  Law makers and NGOs must take into account that people lead holistic lives and actions in one area will inevitably affect another area.  Understanding the needs and lifestyle of the community will help to reduce harmful unintended effects from short-sighted policy.  This is why the NLC favors supporting grassroots organizations within the problem regions.  Grassroots organizations are run by local people who understand from a first-hand perspective the tribulations of the child laborer and their families.  Establishing relationships with these organizations, such as the Solidarity Center that has programs throughout the developing world, and funding them does more to effectively make change than collaborating with governmental policy makers who are not enmeshed in the problem.

            Education is primarily the main solution to child labor and it can be achieved through collaboration with grassroots organizations.   Recently, as reported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the living standards in the rural communities in Africa through Latin America can be advanced by means of providing basic education to the indigenous peoples (2005).  In Chad community schools have been established to teach people how to best sustain their natural resources in order to feed more people.  The schooling is administered in the peoples’ own dialects as well, instead of Chad’s official languages, which exemplifies how the education has been further tailored to the needs of the people.  This makes the community even more receptive to learning.  These measures decrease poverty and hunger, thereby allowing families to make better choices about their children’s futures.  India is also employing innovative approaches to get all children, male and female, into school.  “Enrollment festivals” have been held in 18,000 villages across the state of Gujarat.  During these drives, government and NGO representatives head out to villages and encourage parents to register their children for school.  The parents then take an oath, along with government officials and the children themselves, that every child in the village will have the opportunity to attend school and complete their education (UNICEF, 2005c).  India’s strategies for eliminating child labor have mainly been built upon generating awareness to make community institutions more sensitive and developing a better educational infrastructure.  The enrollment festivals are an example of the formal education system reaching out to children and their families, yet the key is retaining them. 

            The goal of retaining children within the educational system and keeping them out of work can be accomplished by paying children to attend, thereby compensating their families for lost wages, offering non-formal educational opportunities after school, and going beyond basic education to make secondary education available.  Programs that pay children to attend school include the largely successful Bolsa Escola in Brazil, Nicaragua’s Red de Proteccion Social and Mexico’s Oportunidad program.  Other programs provide incentives such as food like food for education programs in Bangladesh and India.  The Oportunidad program in Mexico provides medical tests, nutritional programs and a grant of approximately two-thirds the wage of an average full-time child laborer (Basu & Tzannatos, 2003).   This has had a significant impact on reducing child labor for children ages 12 to 15.  Skoufias and Parker find that the proportion of child laborers in this age group have been trimmed down by 15 to 25% as a result of this program (as cited in Basu & Tzannatos, 2003).  The Red de Proteccion Social program in preliminary studies has also increased school enrollment while decreasing child labor within the rural region which the program targets.  Brazil has also witnessed a decrease in child labor and an increase in schooling directly related to its Bolsa Escola program.  Overall, increasing school enrollment goes hand in hand with a decline in child labor, yet as Basu and Tzannatos mention this decline in child labor is almost never more than or equal to the increase in schooling (2003).  Many children still need to work part-time to afford necessary school supplies or to make up for the expense they cause their family. 

            The Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs’ Children in the Fields Campaign in the U.S. has designed youth programs with stipends for children who go to school and attend after school activities.  Their funding has, however, expired and they are in the midst of restoring it (Reid Maki, personal communication, July 20, 2005).  Non-formal education programs, like after school activities, help to keep children out of child labor by providing opportunities for children to build leadership and critical thinking skills while developing a sense of solidarity.  Non-formal education consists of extra-curricular activities such as youth sports teams.  These activities occupy children’s time outside of class and give them a viable option to going to work.  In Brazil, for instance, the school day is only about four hours long in the public school system and the school year is nine months (Arruda, 2004).  Parents may feel that children are more protected and supervised while engaged in employment than they would be if left to their own devices.  Still, non-formal education does not mitigate poverty, which again is one of the main factors in child labor.  There is a push for secondary education to be made more readily available as well. Even after children have reached the age at which education is no longer compulsory, they should be given the opportunity to continue.  Giving children and families an option may reduce the tendency of children to enter the workforce.  Again, like the others, this strategy does not alleviate financial constraints in the short-term; however there appears to be no short-term fix as far as poverty is concerned.  The way out of poverty is education, which takes time.

            Gender differences have a large role to play at this point. As well as being an ends in and of themselves, gender equality and empowerment of women are a means to eradicate poverty (Van Reisen & Ussar, 2005).  Kofi Annan has stated that educating girls is the quickest way out of poverty (as cited by Clare Nolan, personal communication, June 27, 2005).  Females’ knowledge regenerates more than males, which means that women are the primary educators of their children and are the ones through whom knowledge is passed down (Clare Nolan, personal communication, June 27, 2005).  This is not necessarily culturally bound, although it manifests itself differently in various cultures.   Even in the U.S., the vast majority of single parent households are headed by mothers (Rawlings, 2001).  To be clear, basic education generally includes reading, writing, some computation, and skills specific to the environment. This makes decent work sustainable whether in agriculture, or other work both outside and inside the home.  Skilled labor is not easily replaced.  It is true that women are still discriminated against in many developing countries and so specific job opportunities for women do not abound, but promoting education in order to stop child labor is not a matter of finding specific jobs. Upward mobility is not seen the same in developing countries as it is seen in developed countries.  Basic education is not training people for highly specialized jobs or careers, but rather it is teaching them how to be more efficient in the tasks they already perform and it enhances self-worth.   Education empowers women and girls and gives them an educated voice in the community.  Women represent both themselves and children-- the majority of the world population (Asha Hagi Amin, UNIFEM press conference, 2005).   Therefore, allowing women and girls access to education leads to an educated majority that will be readily equipped to lift themselves out of poverty through using regional resources efficiently and creating skilled jobs for adults all which contribute to the alleviation of child labor.

            Furthermore, the ILOs Time-bound programs (TBP) strive to realize the elimination of child labor by utilizing an integrated approach that combines community and government intervention with education initiatives and social mobilization.  These programs are carried out in phases and given a timeline between five and ten years with regard to the prevalence of the worst forms of child labor and community resources.   The ILO’s International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC) facilitates the country in which the program takes place by providing funding and technical support, but the program itself is initiated and led by the country.  The government of the country must express a commitment to eradicate child labor and then works with civil society partners within the country to take action (ILO, 2005).  Currently TBPs are in effect in El Salvador, Tanzania and Nepal.  Nepal seems to be taking the most action thus far in that is has hosted five regional workshops and an additional national gender workshop to inform and rally government officials on the TBP concept; widely distributed advocacy materials on the worst forms of child labor; initiated geographical mapping and a database of child labor related projects; called for three policy analyses on education, legislation and poverty/decentralization; and hosted a roundtable discussion on TBP with influential policy makers and IPEC supporters to define the program (ILO, 2003c).   The TBPs target the public and government realms in their focus.  TBPs set out to change how children are valued by educating families on the harms of child labor and providing incentives to boost school attendance while also improving and implementing legislation on child labor. 

            All in all, as seen through examples from diverse countries and regions, the way in which these probable solutions are implemented is a bit different depending on the prevalence of the main factors that influence child labor within an individual country.  Supporting organizations at the local level and establishing strong education initiatives seems to be the best approach to eliminating and preventing child labor at the present time.  This is a movement that can only come to fruition if the people whom it directly affects take the first step by making a commitment to systemic change.  As stated by Wasserman, “for the permanent elimination of child labor, a cultural change ultimately has to come from within developing countries” (2000, ¶37).  It would be a mistake to imply, however, that the problem rests solely on these countries; indeed public support in word and in funding must come from the international community as a whole.  The public must assert that child labor is an intolerable reality and then push their respective governments to take action in the form of collaborating with regional experts and allocating funds.  This is not to suggest that money should be thrown at the problem, but rather that developed countries have an obligation to address child labor as a crisis and provide funding so that committed in-country experts can run programs.   These programs will eventually allow families and the country’s workforce as a whole to function efficiently without utilizing child labor.  There is much room for NGOs to partake in developing programs, provide funding and especially help to shape child labor legislation.

            NGOs can give voice to the plight of child laborers by presenting information about the issue to influential decision-makers at all levels of government.  NGOs can then work with governments to help them clarify existing child labor laws and make them consistent, such as in some cases where the minimum work age does not correspond to the age for the end of mandatory schooling.  Along with working at the legislative end, it is important for NGOs build contacts with grassroots organizations run by indigenous peoples.  This way crucial information about the state of child labor and related factors can be disseminated rapidly and from the source.  A more complete understanding of the problem will lead to better policies.  Additionally NGOs should collaborate with communities marred by child labor to provide information on the benefits of education and grants to make easier for families to choose school over work. 

NGOs are now beginning to forgo an adult-focused, welfare-based approach to their work in favor of a child-focused, rights-based approach (ILO, 2002).  NGOs can make the most progress by working to change local mind-sets on child labor after they work to understand the local views.  IPEC projects include NGOs as partners along with employers’ organizations, workers’ organizations and governments.  IPEC has found that NGOs do well to add to the trust within communities when financing for technology development of small businesses to increase efficiency and negate their reliance on children (ILO, 2002).  Above all NGOs must realize that the fight against child labor takes concerted and communal effort.  There are a myriad of actors involved and the main goal is to provide children with a healthy and safe environment in which to enjoy their developmental years, so that they may one day join the workforce as adults with much more to contribute.  This result only comes about with quality education and collaboration with those communities presently facing child labor issues.

Conclusion

Child labor signifies an utter abandon of respect for human rights.  UNICEF regards the child as a full human being and so child labor, because it robs children of their development and ability to contribute to society at their fullest potential, is considered by many, such as the Foundation for the Child and the Family affiliated with ECOSOC, as a crime against humanity (Foundation, 2005).  This being said, there is an urgent demand for action.  Concerned parties must foster good conditions in which the capacity to make change is possible by directly involving children and families and letting them, along with local experts, have the majority of influence on policies.  A comprehensive approach is an absolute necessity and complete information is essential.  New child labor statistics continue to be generated and will soon be available.  One such forthcoming statistical child labor measure is Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys 3 (MICS3) that includes the number of child laborers for approximately 60 countries.  It will be completed in late 2005 or early 2006 (UNICEF, 2005b).  Looking at the information already available, however, sheds light on where the problem areas are and why they exist.  This information leads up to ways to go forward in the fight against child labor.

Based on the current research gathered mainly from the past five years, we have learned that child labor continues to be difficult to measure precisely, but we know it is flourishing, especially in difficult to regulate sectors such as agriculture and domestic service.  We also know that some of the poorest and disease ridden areas, sub-Saharan Africa and India, have a hold on  the highest amount of child laborers and some of the most hazardous forms of child labor.  In addition we have found that programs that combat poverty and provide education for children and education for adults, in the sense that they are taught to alter their views in favor of respecting children, have been found to be the most successful.  Furthermore, keeping watch over stipend programs that pay children/families for school attendance and paying attention to the progress of the ILO’s time-bound programs should provide further knowledge on what does and what does not work.  This knowledge can then be tailored for other regions as well.  

Most importantly, we have come to see that child labor must be viewed within a context factors that include poverty, economic development, gender inequality, cultural values, inadequate education and the AIDS pandemic.  Understanding the web of social and economic issues that connect to child labor is the only way that the world can begin to successfully eliminate it.  Coming full circle, when the international community comes together to evaluate progress toward the Millennium Development Goals, they will be focused on improving the world that will be entrusted to those that are now children.  These government officials will be faced with the fact that we live in a connected world where as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an escapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly” (as cited in Hang & Gage, 2005, ¶7).  Child labor is not a necessary evil; it affects us all and will continue to do so until it is eradicated through continued analysis, monitoring and information sharing on all levels.

 

 

References

Annan, K.A.  (2005).  In larger freedom: Towards development, security and human rights for all.  New York:  United Nations Department of Public Information.

ApparelSearch.  (2005).  The apparel industry and codes of conduct: A solution to the international child labor problem?  Retrieved July 15, 2005, from, http://www.apparelsearch.com/Education/Research/Child_Labor_Clothing/Child_Labor_Fashion_Industry_2005/I_Apparel/Overview.htm.

Arruda, C.  (2004).  Child labour in the Brazilian citrus sector:  The case of Cargill’s double effect.  In L. Bomann-Larsen and O. Wiggen  (Eds.), Responsibility in world business: Managing harmful side-effects of corporate activity  (pp. 245-261).  New York: UN University Press.

Basu, K. & Z. Tzannatos.  (2003).  The global child labor problem: What do we know and what can we do?. The World Bank Economic Review: Child labor and development, 17 (2), 147-173  Cary, NC: Oxford University Press. 

Betcherman, G., J. Fares, A. Luinstra, & R. Prouty.  (2004).  Child labor, education and children’s rights: Social protection discussion paper series.  Retrieved July 5, 2005, from, http//:www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDS/IB/2004/10/12/ 000012009_200401210422/Rendered/PDF/301610PAPER0SP00412.pdf.

Brown, D.K., A.V. Deardorff & R.M. Stern.  (2003).  The determinants of child labour: Theory and evidence.  OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers No. 2.  Paris: OECD.

 

Chao, E.L.  (2004).  Advancing the campaign against child labor volume III: The resource allocations of national governments and international financial institutions.  Washington DC: USDOL ILAB.  Retrieved June 22, 2005, from, http://www.usembassy.it/pdf/other/advance.pdf. 

China Labor Watch. (2005).  Timberland statement regarding working conditions at Kingmaker factory.  Retrieved June 24, 2005, from, http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/en/web/article.php?article_id=50260.

FAO.  (2005).  Education for rural people, a crucial step towards the Millennium Goals.  Rome: FAO Press Release.

Flower, M.F.  (2004).  A  tale of two child laborers.  Human News. (December)  Retrieved May 25, 2005 from, http://ideaexplore.net/news/041201.html#child.

Foundation for the Child and the Family (2005).  Substantive session of 2005 declaration.  New York: UN.

Grimsrud, B.  (2002).  Too much work at too early an age.  In B. Grimsrud (Ed.), The next steps: Experiences and analysis of how to eradicate child labor.  (pp.9-24).  Retrieved June 30, 2005, from, http://www.fafo.no/pub/rapp/932/932.pdf.  Norway: Centraltrykkeriet AS.

Hang, K. & C. Gage.  (2005).  Snapshots for the center for democracy and citizenship.  Retrieved, July 30, 2005, from, http://www.publicwork.org/news_snapshots.html.

Hernandez-Pulido, R. & T. Caron.  (2003). Protection of children and young persons. In Fundamental rights at work and international labour standards.  (pp.89-166). Geneva: International Labour Office.

ICFTU.  (2005).   Stop child labor. Retrieved July 16, 2005, from, www.icftu.org/displaydocument.asp?Index=991216904&Language=EN.

ILO.  (2005).  IPEC action against child labour: Highlilghts 2004.  Geneva:  International Labour Office.

ILO.  (2004).  Understanding child domestic labour and responses to it.  Geneva:  International Labour Office.

ILO.  (2003a). Working out of poverty: International labour conference 91^st session.  Geneva: International Labour Office.

ILO.  (2003b). Investing in every child: An economic study of the costs and benefits of eliminating child labour.  Geneva: International Labour Office.

ILO.  (2003c).  Eliminating the worst forms of child labour: An integrated time-bound approach.  Geneva:  International Labour Office.

ILO.  (2002).  A future without child labour: Global report under the follow-up to the ILO declaration on fundamental principles and rights at work report I(B).  Geneva: International Labour Office.

ILO. (1999).  International programme on the elimination of child labour: Child labour survey report.  Retrieved June 30, 2005, from, http://www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/ipec/simpoc/zimbabwe/report/page6.htm.

ILO Bureau for Workers’ Activities.  (2002).  Bitter harvest: Child labour in agriculture.  Geneva:  International Labor Office

IRIN.  (2005).  Iraq: Focus on child labour.  Retrieved June 3, 2005, from, http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=47022&SelectRegion=Middle_East&SelectCountry=IRAQ.

Law, S.J.  (2005).  Ending child labor: A global priority.  EJournal USA: Economic Perspectives, 10 (1).  Retrieved July 18, 2005, from, http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/ities/0505/ijee/law.htm

Leidholdt, D.A. (October 2003). Coalition against trafficking in women: Demand and the debate.  Retrieved June 23, 2005, from, http://action.web.ca/home/catw/readingroom.shtml?x=53793&AA_EX_Session=50d50889b4826ff733c6bac9690d6191.

Lieten, G.K.  (2004).  Child labour and work: Numbers from the general to the specific.  Retrieved June 30, 2005, from, http://www.childlabour.net/docs/NumbersGKL.pdf

Lopate, L. (Host).  (August 3, 2005). The Leonard Lopate Show [Radio Program].  New York City, NY: WNYC.

Mturi, A.J. & N. Nzimande.  (2003).  HIV/AIDS and child labour in South Africa: A rapid assessment, paper no. 4.  Natal, South Africa:  IPEC/ILO School of Development Studies.

National Labor Committee. (2004).  Timberland in China.  Retrieved July 18, 2005, from, http://www.nlcnet.org/news/public/files_upload/Timberland_China_lett.pdf.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2003). Combating child labour: A review of policies. Paris: OECD Publications.

Rawlings, S.W.  (2001, July 18).  Households and families.  U.S. Census Bureau Population Division and Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division.  Retrieved July 26, 2005, from, http://www.census.gov/population/www/pop-profile/hhfam.html.

Ritualo, A.R., C.L. Castro & S. Gormly.  (2003).  Measuring child labor: Implications for policy and program design. [Electronic version].  Complete Labor Law & Policy Journal, 24, 401-434.

Somavia, J.  (2005a).  Decent work, safe work.  Retrieved July 21, 2005, from, http://www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/safework/decent.htm.

Somavia, J.  (2005b). Eliminating child labor:  A moral cause and a development challenge.  EJournal USA: Economic Perspectives, 10 (1).  Retrieved July 18, 2005, from, http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/ities/0505/ijee/somavia.htm

UNESCO. (2003).  Gender and education for all: The leap to equality summary report.  Paris: UNESCO.

UNICEF. (2005a). Unicef child protection-child labor.  Retrieved May 25, 2005, from, http://www.unicef.org/protection/index_childlabour.html.

UNICEF.  (2005b).  End-decade multiple indicator cluster surveys.  Retrieved May 25, 2005, from, http://www.childinfor.org/eddb/work/index.htm.

UNICEF. (2005c).  Enrollment festivals.  Retrieved August 1, 2005, from, http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/india_27657.html.

UNICEF. (2004).  The state of the world’s children 2005: Childhood under threat.  New York: UNICEF.

UNICEF. (2003).  Building a world fit for children: The United Nations general assembly special session on children 8-10 May 2002.  New York:  UNICEF

UNICEF. (2001).  Poverty and children: Lessons learned of the 90s for least developed countries.  New York: UNICEF

UNICEF. (2000).  Finance development: Invest in children.  New York: UNICEF.

USDOL ILAB. (2005).  International labor standards: Child labor.  Retrieved June 2, 2005, from, http://www.dol.gov/ilab/webmils/intllaborstandards/childlabor.html.

Van Reisen, M. & M. Ussar. (2005).  Accountability upside down: Gender equality in a partnership for poverty eradication.  Brussels: Eurostep & Social Watch.

Wasserman, M.  (2000).  Eliminating child labor.  Regional Review.  Retrieved July 25, 2005, from,  http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/nerr/rr2000/q2/kidlabor.htm.

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.  (2005).  2004 Report on Standards for Suppliers.  Retrieved July 15, 2005, from, http://compedge.wal-mart.com/Files/2004SupplierStandardsReport.pdf.